Well, you see, you encounter a situation like that very frequently,
everyone does in their life.
If you're having a discussion with someone you live with, for example.
So someone you have to be with for a long time.
A lover, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband
Sibling, for that matter.
You're going to have contentious discussions about how to move forward.
And it's very frequently the case that
your words will be... That you'll be straw manned.
Your words will be taken out of context.
The other person and you, too,
will try to win instead of trying to solve the problem.
What you have to kind of decide is two things.
The first thing is
you're probably wrong in some important way, and you might think, well, so what?
But no.
It's not so simple.
Being wrong in some important way is like having a map
that doesn't correspond to the streets.
If you're wrong in some important way,
when you go to where you're going, you will get lost and you might end up
in a neighborhood that you don't want to visit.
So it actually matters if you're wrong.
And so now, if you're talking to someone
who is acting in opposition to you, it's possible
that during your contentious discussion,
they will tell you something about how you're wrong,
that's accurate.
Now, you're not going to be very happy
about that, because who wants to discover that they're wrong?
But it's better to figure out that your map is inaccurate than it is to get lost.
And so one of the things you have
to remember when you're discussing things with people, even if they're
out to defeat you, let's say, is that there is some glimmering
of the possibility that you could walk away with more knowledge than you walked
in with, and that can be worth paying quite a price for.
I've had the opportunity to engage in public debate
of an exceptionally contentious nature for, let's say, 18 months,
nonstop, fundamentally.
And it's been very stressful.
But the upshot of that is
that my arguments are in much better shape than they were...
And I shouldn't say that... My thoughts are much more refined than they were
at the beginning of this process, not my arguments are in better shape.
It's not the right way to think about it. Is that I'm clearer about what I know.
I can articulate it better, and that's all
forged in the heat of conflict.
If you're discussing a contentious issue with someone you love and that you have
to live with and put up with, you want to listen to them,
because what you really want to do is establish a lasting peace,
and you might even have to make their arguments for them.
Maybe you're more verbally fluent than
your partner, which doesn't mean by the way that you're right, more right.
It just means you can construct better arguments on the fly.
Doesn't necessarily mean that you're more accurate.
You might have to help your partner formulate their arguments
so that you can really get to grips with what it is that they're
trying to say so that you can alter the way that you're
constructing your own narrative and your joint narrative so that you're not
butting heads unnecessarily as you move forward through life.
It's not a very good idea to win an argument with your wife.
That isn't what you want, because then you have a defeated partner
and the defeated partner is not happy,
and the defeated partner is often out to reclaim the defeat.
And so as a strategy for moving forward
with someone who you're going to wake up beside
5000 times, it's not a very advisable strategy.
It's better to listen to flesh out the argument on both sides
and to see if you can come to a mutually acceptable negotiated settlement.
And that's the case in most encounters in life, if you can manage that.
But it's easy to want to win.
One of the things I do in my psychology
seminar is I assign papers to students, and then I extract out propositions
from the papers and they're propositions that are debatable.
And so then I outline
the pro side and I outline the cons side.
Like, if you agree with this, this is what you'd think.
If you disagreed with this,
this is what you think, and I divide the students into groups.
It's like
four people per group.
You four are pro, you four are con.
You've got 20 minutes to make a pro argument.
You've got 20 minutes to make a con argument.
We'll go around the table and we'll see who we'll have,
each group rate the other and we'll see who comes out on top.
Well, what you want to do as an educator is
you don't want to put forward a specific point of view,
not when what you're trying to do is to discuss a contentious issue.
What you want to do is teach people how
to take an argument apart and formulate a response.
And to do that,
it's actually extraordinarily useful to arbitrarily assign positions to people.
It's like, I don't care what you think.
You're pro on this topic, generate an argument.
And what that does is it vastly widens
people's conceptualizations of the argumentative space
because most really contentious issues, gun control, abortion, those sorts of things,
there is a lot to be said on both sides.
They wouldn't be contentious issues otherwise.
There are issues that don't go away.
Well, why? Well, because they're so complex,
they don't lend themselves to easy, unitary solutions.
One of the things you want to learn if you're educated is
that on any complex subject, there's a lot to be said
and that you're going to come at that with your particular ideological bias.
Let's say your temperamental bias.
Maybe...
You might even come up with at it with things you've actually thought about.
Although that's pretty damn rare,
but you need to learn just exactly how localized your viewpoint is.
There's psychology experiments that demonstrate this quite clearly.
So imagine that you come into my lab and I ask you whether you're
pro abortion or pro life.
And I get you to rate that on a scale
when you say, well, on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm 8 pro life.
And I say, okay, now you have to write
a 500 word essay that's opposed to your position.
That's the experiment.
And then...
I bring you back,
two weeks later, and I ask you to rate your
position on the same scale.
It will have shifted substantially
to the position that you delineated in your written report.
And the reason for that is that most
people's arguments are unbelievably shallow.
They're not arguments. They're just perceptual biases.
That's one way of thinking about them.
And if you get people to delineate out the space in any rigorous manner,
then their attitudes shift.
What you really want,
if you're going to engage in a discussion
about, say, something like gun control is you want to be familiar with the entire
range of arguments, deeply familiar and have some respect for them.
It's pretty clear that guns kill people.
They're dangerous.
But then it's also not self-evident that the only entities that should be
allowed to be dangerous are the state entities.
So there's things that can be said that are intelligent across that entire
line of that entire distribution of opinion.
And if you are educated,
then you should be conversant with the entire range of opinions.
Now, so that's one approach as an educator is
to teach people how to analyze an argument and to formulate their opinions.
You do people a great service by that's,
teaching them how to think, not what to think, but how to think.
Now,
when I lecture in my psychology courses, which is a different approach, let's say
I take a position on the literature because I have to.
There's no being neutral about the literature.
What am I going to do, pick random studies?
That isn't how people work.
I have a body of knowledge,
and it stems partly from my biases and from my temperaments.
But it's an informed body of opinion.
But what I presented to the students as is
like, look, this is my take on the literature.
That doesn't mean I'm right.
It means that I'm an informed observer.
I'm an informed, singular observer.
And what I'm doing, then, is modeling how an informed,
singular observer would deal with a complex body of literature.
So it's partly... In that role,
I'm not exactly providing facts.
And I'm not exactly teaching people how to think.
I'm saying, if you're a psychologist,
research psychologist and you want to engage
with the literature, here is one way that you would do it.
And so then I'm a model, and I'm a model of a way to be in a particular domain.
Now, that doesn't mean that you have to emulate me
from top to bottom.
But at least you have a sense of what it's like to be a person doing that.